It’s not powerful, so much so that some states don’t allow the cartridge that it fires to be used on deer.

It’s not military grade. It simply looks like a military rifle, as the M16/M4 are all capable of automatic fire and the AR-15 is not.

As for “high-volume magazine clips,” I know what he means, but a clip is one thing and a magazine is another. On top of that a 30-round magazine is a standard capacity magazine for all guns of this type, with roughly 15 million AR-15s being owned by civilians.

Mr. Hunt calls for restrictions on these types of firearms, but in doing so he’s blaming the gun and not the shooter.

If the problem were the AR-15, doesn’t one think that with 15 million of them in circulation that there would be carnage unlike anything since the Civil War?

But in reality there have been only a handful of shootings with the AR-15 as the overwhelming majority of those that own them, including myself, would never consider using them to shoot up a school or a concert.

So what are they useful for? Self-defense for one, and I don’t mean carrying one around town, but in the home.

An AR-15 is more accurate than a handgun. The capacity of the magazine makes the homeowner less likely to have to stumble for extra magazines in the dark of the night.

It has light recoil and an adjustable stock so the same gun can be used by a 6-foot-3-inch man and his 5-foot-four-inch wife.

AR-15s are useful for hunting, as Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms Associate Deputy Director Turk said just last year. They’re also used every weekend by competition shooters.

None of what I’ve said is intended to take away the horror of a mass shooting or any shooting at all.

President Trump misses the mark in two areas when it comes to guns, the late-night comics say. Would the president really have run into a school building, unarmed, to confront a mass shooter? And is arming teachers actually a good idea? https://usat.ly/2HPD0yJ
USA TODAY

The NCAA took away the University of Louisville's 2013 basketball championship because of its sex scandal. The cartoonist's homepage, courier-journal.com/opinion
Marc Murphy, The (Louisville) Courier-Journal

The Rev. Billy Graham disparaged Jews in a conversation Feb. 1, 1972, with President Nixon that was captured on White House recordings. Graham apologized 30 years later when the tapes were made public after denying in 1994 what he had said. The cartoonist's homepage, citizen-times.com/voices-views
David Cohen, Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times

Andy Kennedy is resigning as Ole Miss basketball coach effective at the end of the 2017-18 season. The cartoonist's homepage, clarionledger.com/opinion
Marshall Ramsey, The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger

Bet you've learned more about Devin Nunes in the past month than you ever knew before, the late-night comics say. If you still don't know the man behind the GOP memo, Bill Maher has a cheat sheet, https://usat.ly/2o3GapL
USA TODAY

A Mississippi legislator brought his handgun into the House chamber to protest a gun-rights bill. The cartoonist's homepage, clarionledger.com/opinion
Marshall Ramsey, The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger

Matt Gaetz is a Republican congressman from Florida whose guest to the State of the Union address was a white nationalist from Las Vegas. The cartoonist's homepage, pnj.com/opinion
Andy Marlette, Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal

Quite the contrary, one homicide is too many, and 17 at a high school are far too many.

Rather than blame an inanimate tool, focus instead on putting an end to these kind of mass killings — the great majority of which have been carried out with handguns.

I was raised in Blacksburg, Va., the home of Virginia Tech. At the time of the 2007 massacre there, my sister and my dad were in buildings adjacent to the one in which the mass shooting took place.

They were defenseless as Virginia Tech is a gun-free zone, as were Parkland, Columbine, and the concert in Las Vegas.

Roughly 98 percent of all mass shootings in the U.S. take place in gun-free zones and the worst mass shooting in history took place in 2011 in Norway where guns are very tightly controlled.

Robin Patty(Photo: Submitted)

In Florida, every school campus already has gun control and it’s not working.

Focus on the commonalities between these shootings: A gun free zone, shooters with mental health issues that aren’t being addressed, a general lack of discipline at home and in the schools, and a general lack of security.

Let’s fix these problems first.

There are over 20,000 gun laws on the books federally, statewide and locally.

Enforce these laws before considering new ones.

Robin Patty is a disabled veteran and a former Special Forces operator who resides in Murfreesboro.